A Man Who Named AI: John McCarthy and the End of the Code–Data Divide

Week 06 of the Turing Award Series: how one person got machines to generate new facts instead of just calculating.

Tracing some history of artificial intelligence, I was looking forward to this chapter. John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. He is also directly or indirectly responsible for Lisp, macros, garbage collection, time sharing, and code as data. He is the quintessential computer scientist.

After 20+ years of writing code, I finally wrote Lisp for the first time.

Code and full writeup: https://github.com/nirmal91/turing-award-series/tree/main/06...